It's febreviewary! During my 2026 design / layout / typography challenge, I picked up a bunch of books around the subject. I've previously read Butterick's Practical Typography and Spieker's Stop Stealing Sheep, both of which are stalwarts. I've also been reading It's Nice That articles. That's the limit of my knowledge. Now I've read a dozen or books on or adjacent to graphic design, and I'm reviewing three here!
- Typography essentials: 100 design principles for working with type. 2019. Ina Saltz.
- The complete color harmony: Deluxe edition. 2024. Tina Sutton.
- Web and digital for graphic designers. 2020. Neil Leonard, Andrew Way, & Frédérique Santune.
Preamble (rant)
First I have to vent steam about ebook software. Feel free to skip ahead to the actual reviews.
I had to read the first sections of Ina Saltz's book with the 'overdrive dot com' ebook viewer my library system partners with.
Technically you can use this software to read. It displays pages and you can move between them.
But... You can't see how far through the book you are (this is way more disorienting than I would have guessed). The navigation bar is inscrutable and sometimes has a delay. Nothing is made for mouse clicks. The shortcut for 'chapter back' doesn't work on the first page of a chapter although 'chapter forward' does, so you can skip forward but not back. There's a bunch of stuff you'll seldom use (bookmarks! notes! highlights! word search! previews!) yet the core functionality is awful.
The pages are split for the smallest possible screen size and so none of the examples are on the same page as the corresponding discussion. You have to flip pages constantly. The clincher, then, is that the viewer has baked-in headache-inducing animated 'page turning' visual transitions. These are visually truly unpleasant, and there is no way to turn them off in the accessibility settings.
I tried the 'Libby' app-ified version of the software, which has a setting to "reduce animations". This setting doesn't do anything.
So anyway, the book.
Book 1
Typography essentials: 100 design principles for working with type. 2019. Ina Saltz.
This visually delightful book manages to misspell its own title in the opening paragraphs.
(Spoiler: That kind of thing is going to be a recurring theme in my book reviews this month.)
The content
Typography essentials contains 100 design principles, divided equally into four sections (the letter, the word, the paragraph, and the page). This structure works okay, although frankly the divisions are a bit improvised. Half of the principles in "the word" would fit better in "the letter" (typeface stuff) or "the page" (hierarchy stuff).
This book demonstrates its value through a superb collated collection of visual examples, which I found tremendously useful. The accompanying explanations are usually on point. I wrote lots of notes!
Principle #95 is about tables, charts and infographics, calling that kind of design work "a specialty all its own", and indeed, I'm hoping to find a book about this.
Vagueness
Some of the introductory and bridging text uses vague, emotive, positive language which these days feels chatbot-coded (although note this book predates that).
There's quite a lot of "you can do this thing, or this other thing that is the opposite" without saying what might inform that choice. I kept coming across lines like "Again, everything is relative, so optimum line length may vary based on typestyle, leading, tracking, and even the texture and tone of the printed surface." It's worth stating once, but the author keeps repeating it without discussing how and when such things might vary.
Entry points
A page having "entry points" for the reader is a design concept I'd been struggling to really get. Typography essentials helped a lot! I just wish Saltz had gone into more detail on how to achieve things. Hierarchy cues relative importance and relation of content to the whole, sure. Shifting typographic style will "provide entry points", okay. You should maintain "overall balance [...] simultaneously", got it. But please, more details and examples.
The visuals
It should go without saying that Typography essentials is visually delightful. It's full of examples that are fit to purpose and in most cases just nice to look at. This is a big success.
Typos
The book's generally high production values didn't extend to proof-reading. Just a few examples at random: as well as getting its own title wrong it misspells "cacophony", "typographic", and "flourishes" (repeatedly); uses "it's" for "its"; mispluralises "Lego"; and has a number of systematic grammatical mistakes. That said, its pervasive sloppiness is far from the highest in the design books I've been reading.
In summary
Typography essentials is a great book in most regards. But save yourself a headache if your only option is an e-reader.
Book 2
The complete color harmony: Deluxe edition. 2024. Tina Sutton.
Of a dozen or so books I'm reviewing this month, this might be the nicest-looking. The colours are certainly on point. There's a few layout choices I'm curious about:
- The first paragraph of each section is indented, which always looks odd to me.
- The text columns have a ragged right edge instead of justification, and yet the layout uses both lots of hyphenation and sometimes (e.g. p 34) greatly reduced letter spacing. If you're going that far to crunch the text, why not get the visual benefits of right-justifying?
Tone
The book's introduction contains a semi-endorsement of chromatherapy which is a major blow to the author's credibility. In the lengthy later section on the psychology of colour she again talks about chromatherapy uncritically (e.g., p 161).
Instead of wording something like "Blue hues are associated with calm, order, trust, and loyalty", Sutton writes "Blue: You like a sense of calm and order in your life. Trustworthy, you also value loyalty in others." This sort of thing is pretty frequent. What does the sentence "Mother Nature knows a good thing when she sees it." actually mean? What does it add to the discussion of the colour green?
Both tone and content are a bit 'airy fairy'. Green is "thought to have great healing powers" (p 162), etc.
The verbosity is just a tiny bit higher than necessary. For example, the discussion of "Special effects for color" (pp. 32–34) could easily have been reduced to two pages. It conveys valuable and interesting information, but the extravagant linking sentences and extra adjectives felt like filler. Likewise, the examples are sometimes weak or unnecessary (e.g. listing things that are both gold-coloured and valuable), which is a major contrast to the rest of the design books I've been reading.
Typos
After you work as a copy editor for a while you develop an eye that is so I was glad to only notice three: missing spaces on pages 22 and 180, and a double space on page 94.
Content
Half of the book (pp 50–153) is on "Moods and color". In this section, a page gives a mood, like "Powerful", "Refreshing", or "Nostalgic", with accompanying image and discussion. This page is followed by three pages of two- and three-colour palettes that work for that mood.
This is an interesting tool. I can certainly see it being useful, although I found myself craving some geometric form to have the colours applied to instead of just two or three vertical bars. Consulted as a reference tool, this might not have been a problem.
The discussions of each mood are a mixed bag. Parts are straightforward: particular colours connote things, here's how they are used in advertisements, here's what they are used to symbolise. Other parts are written in annoying ad copy, with phrases like "red can never be ignored" or "pink evokes memories of dreamy June days".
Most of this book could have been presented as a three-column table: <colour; emotion or quality evoked; real-world example>. That would have been much more usable if it's primarily intended as a reference to consult. Writing <colour, evocation, example> tuple in sentence form a thousand different ways only makes sense for reading cover-to-cover (although even then, readers like me might prefer the table).
Focus
The greatest limitation of The complete color harmony is a subtle one. Overall the book is extremely focused on advertising (plus fashion and branding). There's nothing about using colour to e.g. connote threats or danger, evoke grief or disgust, emphasise horror or the macabre, explore alienation and dissociation, etc.
The strictly commercial focus means the things you'd want to know about colour for art aren't covered.
In summary
The complete colour harmony is a fine work. It just wasn't the book I hoped it would be based on the title.
Book 3
Web and digital for graphic designers. 2020. Neil Leonard, Andrew Way, & Frédérique Santune.
This book is a primer for web design. It covers most of the tech stack with a focus on the user-facing design aspects.
The "for graphic designers" part of the title is interesting: I'm not sure whether the authors mean it. Parts of the book assume knowledge about approaches to layout, etc, and describe how to apply them to web formats. But other parts e.g. describe widely-used functions of Adobe Photoshop and give very basic information about file types.
I found the book easy to read, and well-presented. Sections are nicely tied to colour coding. Page numbers are at the outside edges instead of the lower margin; I'm curious what the thinking was there.
Content
Leonard et al. give very wide-ranging, and quite grounded, advice. They cover tools, platforms, SEO, prototyping, content management, the semantic web, etc. There's quite a lot of pragmatic advice (like a hefty subsection on working with clients) which other books have tended to elide.
There are interstitial interviews with ten designers divided into bite-sized Q&A throughout. It was interesting to see the different viewpoints and approaches, but otherwise I didn't think these add much.
Web and digital for graphic designers also has a number of "critical discussions", such as a remarkable subsection on "Marxism and the information economy". Others include technological determinism, feminism and intersectionality, dark UX. I found these very thoughtful, and the authors include a hefty list of further reading for each side topic.
Bits like this, with now-quaint discussions on whether crowdsourcing digital labour leads to homogenising and lower-quality information dissemination on the Internet, make it particularly fascinating to read a book on digital technologies that was published just before the spread of GPT.
Overall the textual content is high-quality and comprehensive, only somewhat undermined by its pervasive...
Errors
The time-to-typo is four paragraphs ("Through, the 1980s,"). From there, Web and digital for graphic designers continually pleads to the cold heavens for a copyedit but its prayers go unanswered.
The typos continued, e.g., "browser rations" for "browser ratios" (p 16); "a huge a stockpile" (p 62); "make sure if it is" (p 132); the phrase "standard characters" copy-pasted mistakenly (p 46);
There are grammar mistakes, awkward phrasings, and unevenness of tone throughout. A mixture of tenses on p 94. "firstly" for "first" on p 134. A stray comma on p 192. A mangled definition on p 93.
Page 34 gives a bullet list of browsers and their percentage market shares. The authors omit the stat from the last browser, then accidentally stylise the closing paragraph as another bullet.
There are outright falsehoods, e.g., "The internet has existed in some form since the Second World War, when it was used as a communication tool" (p 6). Merely ten pages later, the book says "the idea of the Internet was conceived [...] during the Cold War".
All the index entries for entries from page 167 onwards are broken, giving page numbers that are too high by 1–2. It only took a moment's checking to realise the layout was changed without updating the index. Specifically, the culprit is page 166 (examples of hotel bookings design), whose multiplicity of small images indicates that three pages were compressed down to one.
The errors themselves are less frustrating than how fixable they are. I mean, what are we doing here? I read the book casually, noticed the index problem just by browsing, identified the nature of the issue in three minutes, and it would take another three minutes in layout software to fix it. An hour tops if they made the index manually.
Has it been lost, The Deep Knowledge? — By which I mean that an author who can't afford to pay a copy editor for a couple of days can just read the text aloud and pick up most of the problems. Does having multiple authors make editing the text Somebody Else's Problem? Was the text absolutely riddled with errors and they did manage to fix a large percentage of them? I'm really puzzled.
In Summary
Leonard et al. have written a very good book. I wish they had also edited a very good book.
Pick this up if you have an amateur interest in the subject; it's probably recent enough that it hasn't become dated by the fast pace of technological change.
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